The Worst OS

Sarevok · Post by **Sarevok** » 2004-08-16 03:19am

The current title holder for worst OS is Windows Millenium Edition (Win ME). It is a terrible OS that crashes all the time and all programs run slowly on it.

However ME will soon it's place to a new sucky OS called Windows XP Starter Edition. It can run only three programs at one time, limited to 800 x 600 resolution and has no LAN support.

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2004-08-16 03:23am

I think that, honestly, XENIX would take the cake. Bad stability (it was necessary to reboot it periodically), bad superuser tools (tools? WHAT tools?), and a horrendous mess of badly coded binaries. The now-defunct Alamar Corporation used XENIX as a platform for its real-time television timing systems, and the resulting mess was anything but real-time. According to my father, who worked with an Alamar 486/XENIX box for a few years, the boot process after a major system crash was a nightmare, since it needed hex codes and other technical wizardry...

For the non-computer-history buffs, XENIX was a Unix derivative that Microsoft bought, and later sold to SCO (it's now SCO UNIX if I'm not mistaken). (Incidentally, that sale of XENIX to SCO was what resulted in Microsoft owning 25% of SCO shares...)

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2004-08-16 07:20am

Pu-239 wrote:MS didn't originally write DOS- they bought it .

By the later version of DOS I would expect it would have been fairly reworked.

The DOS LanManager had only 128 bytes in conventional memory, how the hell it did that I dont have a clue.

phongn wrote:It could even run 32-bit apps with the hack that was Win32s

It was a great marketing ploy to convince people to move to Win95

There was a version of Windows that would crash after something like 41 days of uptime.

I never bothered to see what happened when you left a Windows98 on for 41 days, might do that with it running under a VM someday just to see what happens.

Random tidbit. Under some version of DOS, it changes the in memory image of win.com to allow Windows 3.x to run on the new version of DOS...

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2004-08-16 10:00am

While it's true that Mac OS 9.x was an awful series (total bloatware), using it was Heaven compared to Windows 95 and 98. Prior Windows versions were similarly crappy compared to their Mac OS counterparts of the time.

The worst current OS, I'd have to say, would be Windows XP. After spending 3 hours removing all the spyware, adware and garbage from an XP box this weekend, I can say that with confidence. Only Windows could drag a 2.6 GHz P4 with 512 MB of RAM through the mud with all the pop-ups and crap on there.

Sokartawi · Post by **Sokartawi** » 2004-08-16 10:11am

aerius wrote:
Faram wrote:Blah whiners!

take a tour of DosShell and you will know hell!
DosShell wasn't bad at all, I still have a copy of it to go along with DOS 6.x. I found Norton Commander was better for me but my dad couldn't figure it out.

Yah, norton commander makes your life in DOS a lot better

Isn't there a windows-based version of it? It's so much more user-friendly then that accursed windows-explorer...

Sokartawi · Post by **Sokartawi** » 2004-08-16 10:13am

ggs wrote:
Pu-239 wrote: There was a version of Windows that would crash after something like 41 days of uptime.
I never bothered to see what happened when you left a Windows98 on for 41 days, might do that with it running under a VM someday just to see what happen...

At least it's not 98SE that does that...

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2004-08-16 11:13am

Sokartawi wrote:
ggs wrote:
Pu-239 wrote: There was a version of Windows that would crash after something like 41 days of uptime.
I never bothered to see what happened when you left a Windows98 on for 41 days, might do that with it running under a VM someday just to see what happen...
At least it's not 98SE that does that...

Yeah, I believe it was 98FE.

Sokartawi · Post by **Sokartawi** » 2004-08-16 11:16am

Pu-239 wrote:
Sokartawi wrote:
ggs wrote: I never bothered to see what happened when you left a Windows98 on for 41 days, might do that with it running under a VM someday just to see what happen...
At least it's not 98SE that does that...

Yeah, I believe it was 98FE.

Hmm still have that lying around so can make a second joke server...

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2004-08-16 11:23am

Durandal wrote:While it's true that Mac OS 9.x was an awful series (total bloatware), using it was Heaven compared to Windows 95 and 98. Prior Windows versions were similarly crappy compared to their Mac OS counterparts of the time.

The worst current OS, I'd have to say, would be Windows XP. After spending 3 hours removing all the spyware, adware and garbage from an XP box this weekend, I can say that with confidence. Only Windows could drag a 2.6 GHz P4 with 512 MB of RAM through the mud with all the pop-ups and crap on there.

If by current OS you mean in use this year, the choices would be OS X, XP, or Linux distros.

If those are the only choice, XP is the obvious answer.

Actually, one of my computers is running the Longhorn Alpha version, and it is HIDEOUS. The GUI design is as inefficient as POSSIBLE, making it as difficult as possible to hit buttons. It's also incredibly bloated- just the sidebar makes the computer slow to a halt, and with graphics affects DISABLED! Explorer.exe hits 168 MB with two windows open.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2004-08-16 01:42pm

Given that the system I'm typing at you from (not the gaming rig

is a Duron 900 with XP Pro... I beg to differ. Any system that gets dragged to a halt by spyware can't be blamed on the OS, but rather the dingus who mucked their system up that badly and never cleaned it before it became a huge problem. The gaming rig...let's see, I think the last time I turned it off was the middle of last month, when I went on vacation, so yeah, stability anyone?

Terr Fangbite · Post by **Terr Fangbite** » 2004-08-16 03:22pm

I find it interesting all the posts made against ME. I can understand this because though I have never worked with ME everytime someone tells me they have a problem with ME I laugh and say, can't help you. However I am just aghast at how many people want to say the worst current OS. I said twice that I wanted to know the worst OS IN ALL OF COMPUTING HISTORY!!!!. Its pretty obvious that the worst in current standings is a windows version, but I was curious to see if people thought that anything was worse than windows (and from the vaste expanses of ME votes, I guess not.). If someone has something besides the worst current OS or ME, please post it, I'm still curious to see if something got worse than that.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2004-08-16 04:35pm

Multics? And I believe XENIX/SCO Unix was mentioned several times

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2004-08-16 06:42pm

Worst OS in all of history?
Whatever was running on ENIAC and could hold only 40 bytes of data total.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2004-08-16 06:58pm

ENIAC didn't have an OS.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2004-08-17 02:14am

Okay then, the first computer with an operating system after ENIAC

Xisiqomelir · Post by **Xisiqomelir** » 2004-08-17 02:53am

Praxis wrote:Okay then, the first computer with an operating system after ENIAC

History of operating systems

That still sounds far more advanced than winblows to me...

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2004-08-17 11:45am

True

Terr Fangbite · Post by **Terr Fangbite** » 2004-08-18 05:43pm

The test of an operating system is what its performance value is compared to what it was intended to do. For instance, while ENIAC may have the processing power of a calculator, thats all it was supposed to do, and it did it to the best of the abilities of the day. Windows however which crashes programs for no reason other than normal running, shows a lack in performance compared to what it was intended to do (i.e. run said program)..

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2004-08-18 06:52pm

ggs wrote:The DOS LanManager had only 128 bytes in conventional memory, how the hell it did that I dont have a clue.

Reading some of the MS dev blogs, have we? The guy also talked about how Bill Gates yelled at them about the total program taking up 64KB since BASIC only used up 8KB.

Random tidbit. Under some version of DOS, it changes the in memory image of win.com to allow Windows 3.x to run on the new version of DOS...

Muwahaha

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2004-08-18 09:48pm

You want a bad OS? The current Alpha version of Longhorn, build 4074. Cruddy interface, slow, doesn't support even slightly older cards (such as my 64 MB Geforce2 MX 400)....etc.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2004-08-18 10:05pm

Praxis wrote:You want a bad OS? The current Alpha version of Longhorn, build 4074. Cruddy interface, slow, doesn't support even slightly older cards (such as my 64 MB Geforce2 MX 400)....etc.

I don't think alpha releases count.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2004-08-18 10:22pm

phongn wrote:Reading some of the MS dev blogs, have we?

Yup.

Regardless of what you think of Microsoft, its truely fascinating to get insights into why the hell they did something the way they did.

The guy also talked about how Bill Gates yelled at them about the total program taking up 64KB since BASIC only used up 8KB.

But in fairness, 640K of address space wasnt nice to play in. And taking up 64k was a truely massive chuck of that address space.

Muwahaha

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2004-08-18 10:46pm

ggs wrote:Regardless of what you think of Microsoft, its truely fascinating to get insights into why the hell they did something the way they did.

Osterman, Chen and Pratley's blogs are the ones I pay the most attention to since they seem to have been with Microsoft for a decent amount of time.

Muwahaha

IIRC, they also talked about how they wrote a routine in their memory manager for SimCity that detected if it ran and then changed to a different memory management scheme specifically for that game. SimCity was doing some weird undocumented voodoo and it had to run, so...

Jade Falcon · Post by **Jade Falcon** » 2004-08-22 08:27am

I've heard that one of the truely hideous OS's of all time was IBM's OS2/Warp.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2004-08-22 10:31am

Jade Falcon wrote:I've heard that one of the truely hideous OS's of all time was IBM's OS2/Warp.

I've heard from people who both hated OS/2's architecture and those who loved OS/2 for being an early 32-bit OS.